When the movie did well, I thought Sunset would certainly green-light Little Women. But Ari wanted Ed Baker and me in another movie as fast as possible. We didn’t do sequels back then. Instead, we would essentially just make the same movie again with a different name and a slightly different conceit.
So we commenced shooting on Next Door. Ed played my uncle, who
had taken me in after my parents died. The two of us quickly fell into respective romantic entanglements with the widowed mother and son who lived next to us.
Don was shooting a thriller on the lot at the time, and he used to come visit me every day when his set broke for lunch.
I was absolutely smitten, in love and lust for the very first time.
I found myself brightening up the moment I set eyes on him, always finding reasons to touch him, reasons to bring him up in conversation when he wasn’t around.
Harry was sick of hearing about him.
“Ev, honey, I’m serious,” Harry said one afternoon in his office when the two of us were sharing a drink. “I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with this Don Adler talk.” I visited Harry about once a day back then, just to check in, see how he was doing. I always made it seem like business, but even then I knew he was the closest thing I had to a friend.
Sure, I’d become friendly with a lot of the other actresses at Sunset. Ruby Reilly, in particular, was a favorite of mine. She was tall and lean, with a dynamite laugh and an air of detachment to her. She never minced words but she could charm the pants off almost anybody.
Sometimes Ruby and I, and some of the other girls on the lot, would grab lunch and gossip about various goings-on, but, to be honest, I would have thrown every single one of them in front of a moving train to get a part. And I think they would have done the same to me.
Intimacy is impossible without trust. And we would have been idiots to trust one another.
But Harry was different.
Harry and I both wanted the same thing. We wanted Evelyn Hugo to be a household name. Also, we just liked each other.
“We can talk about Don, or we can talk about when you’re green-lighting Little Women,” I said teasingly.
Harry laughed. “It’s not up to me. You know that.”
“Well, why is Ari dragging his feet?”
“You don’t want to do Little Women right now,” Harry says. “It’s better if you give it a few months.”
“I most certainly do want to do it right now.”
Harry shook his head and stood up, pouring himself another glass of scotch. He didn’t offer me a second martini, and I knew it was because he knew I shouldn’t have had the first one to begin with.
“You could really be big,” Harry said. “Everybody’s saying so. If Next Door does as well as Father and Daughter and you and Don keep going on the way you have been, you could be a big deal.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what I’m banking on.”
“You want Little Women to come out just when people are thinking you only know how to do one thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“You had a huge hit with Father and Daughter. People know you can be funny. They know you’re adorable. They know they liked you in that picture.”
“Sure.”
“Now you’re gonna do it again. You’re going to show them that you can re-create the magic. You’re not just a one-trick pony.”
“All right . . .”
“Maybe you do a picture with Don. After all, they can’t print pictures of the two of you dancing at Ciro’s or the Trocadero fast enough.”
“But—”
“Hear me out. You and Don do a picture. A matinee romance, maybe. Something where all the girls want to be you, and all the boys want to be with you.”